Eugene is of course famous for being the home of “Animal House“, that legendary movie of campus debauchery. When I walked by this house the other day, that’s obviously what sprung to mind, a big old run-down house with a couple of old cars out front and other signs Animal House-dom.
Now you might assume that there’s still plenty of these student hell-holes around given that Eugene is a university town, but you’s be wrong. Not only is this house not occupied by students, but it’s just about the last of its kind. Student housing has gentrified at an even faster pace than the rest of the town. Things have changed mightily that way, which makes this a bit refreshing, even if it isn’t a genuine Animal House.
Here’s the original. And even it wasn’t exactly representative at the time when the film was shot in 1978, as this old house was scheduled to be razed and replaced with an ugly medical office.
Just a few blocks away stands one the many giant new student housing complexes built in Eugene in the past dozen years or so. There’s been a huge boom in these here and in other university towns, as large corporations realized there was money to be made, especially during the recent period of extremely low interest rates.
Student housing trends reflect the changes in society at large, meaning the greater stratification of income means that most students know come from upper-middle class families (or better), and grew up in nice newer houses. So kids nowadays are not interested in slummy old houses, even guys. This has changed the whole student housing rental market here considerably. The older apartments near the campus are increasingly being rented by non-students, and the once very high rents for houses near campus have moderated. And many of them have been sold, due to high real estate prices and moderating rents for them.
Students want to live in these places, as they have all the amenities, including designated socializing/party areas, like on the rooftop of this building, the HUB.
Back to this house. It’s out on the west side, not a typical student area. But it’s still something of an outlier or time capsule, as gentrification’s relentless march has its effect. Well, that and a Volvo 122 does tend to hark back to a different era.
The driveway includes an old Toyota pickup and a bit of other stuff. As rents have risen, owners of rental properties have found it more lucrative to spruce them up and get tenants that are bit less old-school than these.
Of course I don’t know who actually owns this place. Someone’s aunt or uncle?
Speaking of Animal House, being named Niedermeyer and living in Eugene means I do get asked none too often about that. Of course! I am Niedermeyer!
And looking at this clip, one would hardly recognize the location now, with historic Hayward Field in the background. it’s currently a massive construction zone, as it was all torn down to make room for a new Hayward Field.
This is what’s going up, another massive project financed by Phil Knight, co-founder of Nike, which started right here at Hayward Field, when Knight started making better running shoes at home and selling them to his fellow runners.
The Animal House era is truly gone.
Cool article that hits home. As a somewhat recent college graduate I can assure the Animal House cultural is alive and well in the mid-west. Plenty of dilapidated Queen-Anne’s or craftsman bungalows with couches in the beer-soaked yard next to a few-decades old vehicle.
A friend of mine is a single woman in her late 50s who lives in an older home near The Ohio State University. In the last five-ish years the owners have all sold to landlords and now she lives on a party street. The noise from the kids, especially in the adjacent houses, makes her wish she were in a better financial position and could leave. She calls the police at least once a week, usually about noise but frequently about drug use, public nudity, and trash.
I didn’t mean to imply it’s stopped here too, but the number of rental houses being sold because of our very high real estate prices is slowly dampening this. Slowly. In any case, it’s not expanding anymore. Also, enrollment at the U of O has been declining slightly for years, as part of the demographic time bomb. With all the new student apartments going up, that has sucked up a lot of the student rental business.
BTW, I still rent to some students, but strictly grad students. I have two units rented to philosophy Phd candidatess, and one in chemistry writing his dissertation. Perfect tenants!
My daughter goes to university in Waterloo, Ontario. There are two universities and one college there, not to mention all of the learn English and other facilities. Total student population is 45,000. All of the single family homes near the schools are being bought up to build condos. Each condo unit typically has five bedrooms and two washrooms in it. Not the best way to study. Luckily my daughter will be finished her graduate program next month.
My son is starting at Waterloo in September.
Grebel residence FTW 🙂 , I can’t see my son driving a Volvo 122 with roofracks for his student mobile, but I think my daughter could be that kind of girl 🙂
Not with the level of road salt Ontario uses, or at least not for long!
Volvos didn’t rust that badly by ’60s-’70s standards…but that was a *low* bar…
Congrats on your son going to Waterloo. It is a really good school.
My son started at UBC last September. He’s fortunate to be able to live at home.
Yes, the “inflation” in student housing was brought home to me as my kids were college-shopping. I attended a mid-sized state university (Ball State in Muncie, Indiana – home of the famous Chevrolet transmission). While there I lived in the second-newest dorm on campus (built in 1965 which was not yet 15 years old then), which was all cinder blocks, linoleum and (of course) no air conditioning.
That building has now been torn down and when my son went there it had become the oldest dorm on campus. The new places are like a posh hotel with expensive finishes and plenty of ice cold air blowing in the hot months. Oy!
Some of the cheap old houses off campus remain, though. Muncie is a blue-collar city that has suffered through the loss of multiple large employers and has lots of houses that look a lot like the one you feature here.
In my experience, when it comes to underclassmen cinder block and linoleum is not a bad idea. When my kids went to college they spent their first year in one of these buildings. Afterward, they went to brand new buildings with drywall and carpet, both very bad ideas. When I moved them out in the Spring there were holes in the drywall and God knows what was staining the carpet.
NEIDERMEYER!!!
>>>The Animal House era is truly gone.
Gone? Over? Nothing is over ’till we decide it is! Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbour?!
Seriously, Animal House is one of my favorite films. I toss out quotes from it all the time, but I never knew it was filmed in Eugene.
I was a student in the 1980s in Binghamton, NY, and I remember those party houses. In fact, my brother and I nearly bought one of them after I graduated, in order to rent to younger students. At the time, a house like that but in decent shape, could be had for $40K. Unfortunately, my brother made some bad investments and we had to move back to Brooklyn instead of becoming landlords in a college town. Today student housing is so gentrified that something like that would be completely out of reach.
Seven years of college down the drain!
There’s a documentary about the making of “Animal House” that’s made the rounds on various cable outlets over the years. I don’t know where you’d go to stream it now, but it’s well worth catching if you like the movie (and I do…I lived in Eugene 1975-77, so I just missed being there when the movie was made). The documentary reveals that the producers asked permission of a whole bunch of schools, all of whom replied with one version or another of “Oh HELL No!” Until they sounded out UO–whose overlords surprisingly said “Sure! Come right up here!” (I worked at Iowa State for 32 years, and the near-campus area in Ames still had plenty of ancient, dilapidated party houses when I retired in 2009, much to the chagrin of the area homeowners, who couldn’t do a thing about the noise, the trash, or the occasional riot.)
I remember seeing Animal house in theaters when it was released when I was fifteen…with my mom and dad. (My parents had already divorced, but still did things together with me.) My mom exclaimed as we were leaving, “I’m afraid Frankie might not want to go to college after seeing this.” Dad replied, “Are you kidding? After seeing this movie, we won’t be able to stop him if we wanted to.” LOL!
I believe that house is going to be your next rehab project, Paul!
Bellingham has faced much of the same thing. It used to be such a cheap town to live in, fortunately because wages were always quite lower than Seattle 70 miles away. With the typical overblown PNW real estate prices, its like trying to live with Seattle prices on a Whatcom county budget. Bellingham was trying to pass an ordinance or some such that there were to be no more than 3 unrelated people sharing rent in a house, trying to keep the Animal House vibe from happening on their street. I don’t know if they were successful in passing it. The Letter Ghetto (…sorry, I meant Letter Street District) was resurrected and refurbished a few years back. No more tie-dye tapestries in the windows here anymore. The York neighborhood still houses a lot of students, but has been slowly getting better and less dilapidated. I haven’t been there since I lived there, but I’ll bet Happy Valley is the same way. If any of you saw the “riots” that happened next to the University a few years back, that happened in a neighborhood that once was quite ornate, but had its Victorian houses turned into apartments decades ago. Good place for car theft now.
The biggest reason this town keeps growing is not the locals. Its outside money coming in from wherever people are moving from. A lot of us can’t live in town anymore off of $12/hr. That’s some of the reason I moved out to the hills years ago.
We have the “you and two” ordinance here (Fort Collins, CO), have had it for decades now. You can’t have more than three unrelated people living together, no matter the number of rooms or parking spaces except for (rare) boarding house zoning. Every rental contract and house sale contract requires it and the fines are VERY stiff for violations if/when caught. Enforcement does exist, the vast majority of landlords do not attempt to cheat. Sometimes students further “sublet” illegally and then when caught their parents who usually consigned the lease are on the hook for large fines etc.
The occasional out of control parties where the police show up in riot gear usually occur at the larger student focused apartment complexes instead of residential side streets now.
Way back when living near the beach was not completely respectable, I lived that lifestyle for a few years in my 20’s. Gentrification has pushed rents here way too high for that. As Paul stated, young people today are not the same as I remember. Probably a good thing.
I see similar luxury apartments in Corvallis but a lot of students are renting typical suburban houses. My son’s housing solution is 3 people in a townhouse near Dimple Hill, across the street from a math professor.